She's the boss

Workplace changes ahead if boys' school performance doesn't improve

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Imagine a world where most corporate executives are women, and most high-school dropouts are men.

It may sound like science fiction, but some say it will become reality if young men don't start earning more college degrees.

While girls' educational attainment continues to skyrocket, boys' performance at school, from elementary through college, has stayed flat or worsened for decades -- meaning men's ability to land professional jobs in the future will decline.

Men earned 43 percent of all bachelors' degrees and 42 percent of master's last year, down from 51 percent of both types of degrees in 1980. Meanwhile, the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to women increased by 21 percent, compared with men's increase of 6 percent, between 1990 and 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In primary school, boys consistently score lower than girls on national reading and writing tests, with the gap greatest in 12th grade. And while boys score higher in math, their lead is far smaller than girls' lead on the reading and writing tests.

"Boys are a year-and-a-half behind girls in reading and writing, and girls are a month behind in math and science," said Michael Gurian, author of "What Could He Be Thinking? How a Man's Mind Really Works" (St. Martin's Press, 2003).

Plus, about 12 percent of men aged 16 to 24 were high-school dropouts, compared with 9 percent of women that age, in 2001. In the 1960s and 70s, the rate was about equal between the sexes. And in middle and high school, 73 percent of those with learning disabilities and 76 percent of those who are emotionally disturbed are boys, experts said.

Combine boys' school results with a growing number of jobs that require college degrees and the outlook for males is not positive.

"The problem is the educational-attainment requirements of the job market are growing and have been growing steadily and sharply since about 1973 and the boys aren't increasing their college graduation rates," said Tom Mortenson, senior scholar with the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.

"The proportion of boys that are preparing for these jobs has remained flat for the last 30 years, whereas the proportion of females who are preparing for these jobs is growing enormously."

Lower wages, fewer benefits

Many boys continue to successfully complete college, but the repercussions for those who don't will be significant.

If boys' current high school dropout rate continued, "theoretically we might not see one male in college somewhere between 2020 and 2038," said Dr. William Pollack, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of "Real Boys' Voices" (Penguin 2001).

"Do I believe that's going to happen? Of course not," he said. "We're talking about a bell curve ... there are boys who are outliers doing very poorly anyway and there are boys who are high in functioning who will do well no matter what."

While there are prospects for those who don't hold college degrees -- almost two-thirds of job growth from 2000 through 2010 will be in careers that require only on-the-job training, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics -- these are often low-paying jobs with little in the way of benefits.

"Men are going to out-proportion in vocational jobs. That's going to be the trend if we don't figure out how to educate them," Gurian said. "There will still be men who run companies, but women are going to tend to dominate managerial professions."

The effect on men's' wages will be sharp. "Economists may not agree on a whole lot but we all agree that the wage premium associated with an extra year of education is significant and important," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute. "For every extra year of education, you earn about 7 percent more than you would otherwise. That's a nontrivial boost."

In 2000, when the overall unemployment rate was 4 percent, the rate for high-school dropouts was 6.3 percent. For college graduates it was 1.7 percent. That year, the median earnings of a high-school dropout were $17,337, while someone with a bachelor's earned $40,314, a master's degree holder earned $48,972, and those with professional degrees earned $72,390 on average.

What's behind it?

Some say teachers lowered their expectations for student performance, and that meant boys pushed themselves less hard. "To some extent, society's attitude changed," Pollack said. "The attitude was boys had to be good little boys and succeed, so they pushed themselves."

When boys were being pushed to succeed, the fact that school curricula are ill tailored for boys' learning style was not as obvious. Now, "we've loosened up on pushing kids to succeed ... well, if you go at your own rate and the curriculum is wrong for you, you'll fall down in a sense."

Most boys, Pollack and others say, are biologically programmed to move more, and usually find it more difficult to sit still than girls. "The average boy up until 5th grade needs about five to 10 recesses a day," he said. "He's lucky if he gets one." And what happens if he squirms in his seat? "We take away his recess."

Plus, young boys have a spatially oriented sense of learning, Pollack said. Because "a lot of the learning is not spatially oriented ... he starts getting frustrated, then we say he's a bad boy and we discipline him or we say he's a disturbed boy, and we diagnose him" as hyperactive.

And, while many say school curricula aren't a perfect fit for girls either, girls are better able to succeed at it. Boys see girls getting rewarded for doing better, and boys' self-esteem drops. "If you're not pushed against your will," said Pollack, "and your self-esteem as a learner drops, what happens? You fall off."

While the focus on addressing girls' educational barriers may have played a part in boys' falling performance, it wasn't the cause. "It's not a zero-sum game," Pollack said.

"Boys did better on reading and writing tests 15 years ago than they're doing now. Girls are doing better than they did 15 years ago, but girls can get better without boys falling behind," he said.

The focus on girls simply distracted educators from keeping a watchful eye on boys as well. "The women's movement was wonderful to get women up there," Pollack said, "but no one was watching that boys are slipping behind."

Andrea
Coombes

Andrea Coombes is a personal-finance writer and editor in San Francisco. She's on Twitter @andreacoombes.

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